A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

214 goal
different university centres. It originally united adherents to the extended standard
theory, and is now oriented towards government-binding theory and
the minimalist programme.
goal (n.) A term used by some linguists as part of the grammatical analysis
of a sentence: it refers to the entity which is affected by the action of the verb,
e.g. The cat caught a mouse. Several other terms have been used for this idea,
e.g. ‘patient’, ‘recipient’. In localistic theories of meaning, an entity takes a
‘path’ from a ‘source’ to a ‘goal’. In case grammar, it refers to the place to
which something moves. See actor–action–goal, semantic role.
God’s truth A phrase coined in the 1950s to characterize one of two extreme
states of mind of a hypothetical linguist who sets up a description of linguistic
data; opposed to hocus-pocus. A ‘God’s truth’ linguist approaches
data with the expectation that the language has a ‘real’ structure which is
waiting to be uncovered. The assumption is that, if one’s procedure of analysis
is logical and consistent, the same description would always emerge from the
same data, any uncertainty being the result of defective observation or logic on
the part of the analyst. In a hocus-pocus approach, by contrast, no such assumption
is made.
govern (v.) (1) A term used in grammatical analysis to refer to a process of
syntactic linkage whereby one word (or word-class) requires a specific
morphological form of another word (or class). For example, prepositions
in Latin are said to ‘govern’ nouns, making a certain case form obligatory (e.g.
ad plus accusative). The notion is, accordingly, not readily applicable to a
language like English, where case endings are few – to say that, in the man
kicked the ball, kicked ‘governs’ the ball is true only in a loose semantic sense
(and, even then, it is debatable whether this is a valid notion of government,
when the relationship between other elements is considered: almost any pairs
of elements, e.g. the man and kicked, might be said to be displaying government,
in this sense). The term is usually contrasted with agreement, where the
form taken by one word requires a corresponding form in another.
(2) In generative grammar (see Aspects model), a rule is said to be governed
or ungoverned depending on whether it does or does not have lexical
exceptions. For example, because not all active transitive sentences take the
passive (e.g. They have a car, The hat suits you), the passivization rule would
be said to be ‘governed’. An example of an ungoverned rule is reflexivization
VP
V
PP
P
NP
looked
at
John